With a swim meet coming up, I put together a list of some of the key things for new swimmers--both young and old--to think about. Racing isn't the most important thing for everyone, but I've never met an athlete who didn't want to perform their best once the whistle sounded. With a little bit of preparation, you can make the odds of that happening a lot more likely. I've broken the advice into five major sections. Let me know what I've missed!

In late January 2017 a new pool opened in my neighbourhood. This left me no excuse but to get back into the water after a six-year hiatus--the longest break since I started competitive swimming at age nine. During this lay-off I've been pretty good about making it to the gym for treadmill running and weights 3-or-so times a week. But I was in anything but water shape, so it was definitely time to go back. I also wanted to take advantage of the new fitness tracker technology. I used a FitBit for...

ParseHub is an intuitive, graphics-based web scraper that allows you to pull in significant amounts of data with very little preparatory learning. I spent a bit of time over the Christmas holidays playing around with it, and collected a few of the main lessons below.

Sports Reference.com has an excellent (though presumably soon-to-be-extinct) Olympics database. The data contained there is incredible--an even more detailed look at Olympic results than David Wallechensky's indispensable Summer and Winter Complete Book compendia. I've wanted to take a closer look at fatigue and average pace curves for swimming. This follows some running prediction work I did a while back based on Peter Riegel's 1981 "Athletic Records and Human Endurance" article in American...

I’ve built a calculator to tally up the points in 'Ticket to Ride' after the last train has been laid. It's handy for the purposes of the game, but the model is useful any time you want a spreadsheet to automatically inform you of ranked results (who came first, who came second, etc).

There are three basic ingredients to a successful kids swim meet: Air horn for the start (swimmers’ love for the sound corresponds with their parents’ hate). Pizza for the after-party. Lifeguards willing to look the other way when it comes to maximum hot tub occupancy standards. On top of this I would add a fourth ingredient, one integral to sporting success no matter the level: a rockin’ warmup soundtrack. With a meet last weekend I had the opportunity to put together a playlist....

I haven’t read much of the self-help / effective habits genre, but it was recommended I take Tim Ferriss’ Tools of the Titans for a spin. Though I can’t say the in-depth discussion of psychedelics or quirky workout routines held much interest for me, there is a tonne if interesting stuff in there. I can’t suggest it enough. What follows are a few nuggets I found worth writing down. I’ve denoted ‘TF’ for the suggestions from Ferriss directly, and wrote out the names of his...

Cleveland’s signing of the parrot-toting slugger Edwin Encarnacion was more than a savvy grab by a World Series runner-up looking to bulk up on home runs. It was also demonstrative of a Blue Jays front office that both comically misread the declining long-ball market and revealed the new regime's noncommittal strategic attitude that we all feared. Now I get that a professional sports franchise is a business, and that I as a fan have no right to demand the firm hold a commitment to winning...